Airfoil Design and Wind Tunnel Testing

An airfoil/blade section profile design tool, AIRFOILOPT, has been developed at Risø. This tool uses the flow solver XFOIL or the in-house 2D CFD code, EllipSys2D, in combination with numerical optimisation

We have designed several airfoil families tailored for wind turbines to achieve improved stalling characteristics, greater aerodynamic conversion efficiency and less sensitivity of the performance to contamination of the airfoil.

Desirable characteristics for wind turbine airfoils differ significant from traditional aviation airfoils. To ensure the rapid documentation of blade section profiles for the design of new wind turbine blades, Risø, with the support of the Danish Energy Authority has developed an advanced testing method for wind tunnel testing of 2D airfoil sections.
The measurements are carried out in the Velux Open Jet facility. Several airfoils were tested so far